Language, Image, Editing, & Bias: A Quick Case Study

Chuck Norris and his wife Gena recently published a video urging their fellow conservative Americans to get out and vote to end an “attack” on freedom during this “tipping point” election, because “quite possibly, our country as we know it may be lost forever if we don’t change the course in which our country is headed,” which is “the direction of socialism, or something much worse.” Action on the part of Christian evangelicals is urged by the Norris couple in order to head off disaster. Via a series of quotes from Edmund Burke and President Ronald Reagan, the couple paint a goal of fighting the “triumph of evil,” keeping “freedom” from “extinction,” and avoiding “the first step into a thousand years of darkness.” Pathos aplenty drips from this video, stoking fears among their audience of evil, the other, and left-wing politics. Check it out for yourself.

The language employed in this piece is inflammatory, and often delivered by proxy through out of context quotations. Apocalyptic at times, I thought. Which was why I was a bit surprised by the kid-glove treatment given Chuck Norris by Bill O’Reilly on his Fox News show. It is no surprise that the two share a common political condition, but the soft-serve question and lack of a follow-up question by O’Reilly are quickly subsumed by a series of images – boarded up houses and storefronts – flashed over Norris’s unsupported claims about Obama’s economic policies create a clear tone with obvious implications laid down over a discussion devoid of hard facts (insofar as they still exist today!). This could be the basis of an interesting deconstruction and comparison exercise a la the IB Language and Literature curriculum.